Faithful Catholics should be careful about falling into the trap that government action and new public policies are the ready solution

to all social problems.

We are familiar enough with left-of-center Catholics, like Catholics United and the professors who publicly opposed House Speaker John Boehner’s honorary degree from The Catholic University of America in 2011, beating the drum for governmental—especially federal government—“solutions” to problems. We also witness it, however, from some Catholics known for being committed to the orthodox teaching of the Church. When someone is too insistent about reducing the role of government or even just raises questions about certain public policies, there are those who are quick to put him into such categories as “neoliberal” or “neoconservative.” There is a tendency to slip into the practice of absolutizing public policy approaches or other matters of prudential judgment and treating them like they are doctrinal mandates.

A reviewer of one of my books—apparently an orthodox scholar, although not well-known in those circles—is a case in point. He took me to task for asserting—after a considerable discussion about Catholic social teaching in a 700-page book—that legislation should be adopted only when “absolutely needed.” He insisted that such a view was not “magisterial” and collided with Aquinas’ argument that the legislator is needed to move a people to the common good. While Catholic social teaching holds that the securing of the common good is a main task of the state, it nowhere says that this means that legislation or enacting a new public policy or program is the singular way to do this. Sometimes—even frequently—government is best able to help fashion good social conditions by stepping back. If one can think of a scenario that might best depict what Catholic social teaching, in its essence, aims for it would be this: The building up of a moral culture and citizenry, a basic juridic framework to protect economic and other rights, and a healthy and vital civil society to carry on most economic and social welfare matters. The state’s role would be to enact appropriate legislation to head off likely problems—like the labor legislation Pope Leo XIII called for (Rerum Novarum #39)—and working with the private sector on such things as economic planning to head off unemployment problems (Laborem Exercens #18), and to always “oversee” things with an eye to the common good, ready to intervene to stop serious abuses such as the growth of destructive monopoly.

Moreover, a smug assurance about the value of more legislation and public policy in solving social problems is easily undermined by the repeated reality of unintended consequences and interest group government, where even failing policies cannot be dislodged because special interests begin to profit from them.

My phrase “absolutely needed” indicates the urgency today of restraining runaway government. In an era of 75,000 pages of federal regulations with their increasing complexity, vagueness, and contradictoriness and when enforcement people in government and authorities outside it can’t agree on what laws and regulations actually require, it’s hard to claim that we need more law. Should we really be legislating when it’s not clearly needed? While the reviewer may be correct in identifying the high calling of the legislator according to Aquinas and Aristotle before him, isn’t it clear that so many of them today don’t measure up? This is not an era marked by great statesmanship. Moreover, is the role of a legislator just to pass laws? Senator Howard Baker in the 1980s lamented the much-diminished role of the U.S. Senate as a great debating body, which had once helped to explore, clarify, and better understand great national questions. Isn’t that part of what the legislator does to further the common good?

To believe that government will necessarily act rightly—without looking at its track record or the context of a time—is simply foolish.

Before enlisting Aquinas in the cause of activist government, one should consider his admonitions that human law not try to repress all vices or prescribe all virtues. It should not be like Calvin’s Geneva, or our Calvinist-like secular state of today which increasing seeks to regiment so many areas of life. It certainly should be concerned about promoting virtue—the social teaching of the Church says that one of government’s roles, to be sure, is to make men better—but it must also be realistic and aware of other problems that could easily develop if it pushes too far. It’s not a question of government having either an activist or minimalist role, but a proper one.

The reasons are quite basic. Secular intellectual authorities believe they stand for a way of understanding the world, free unprejudiced inquiry carried on by disinterested professionals, that is sufficient as well as uniquely correct. The Church considers neutral secular expertise insufficient, since the world is neither neutral, secular, nor fully comprehensible by human means. She therefore accepts additional sources of knowledge, such as tradition, revelation, and natural law, and appeals to them especially in regard to ultimate issues and questions of value.In such cases the kind of expertise on which secular intellectual authorities rely gives no definite answer. Those authorities therefore apply some default principle they consider neutral, like freedom, equality, or efficiency. Because the Church rejects that solution, they view Catholic doctrine as essentially arbitrary and oppressive.That view dominates public discussion today. The result is that the secular media never bother to get Catholic beliefs right. They have no respect for them, and tailor their account of them to the general story they want to tell about the world. What passes for neutral rationality, it turns out, has a mythology and plot line of its own. Mainstream academia is much the same: it is reluctant to accept truth or authority that elude its control, so it tends toward a reductive, dismissive, or negative view of religion in general and Catholicism in particular. Even Catholic colleges, who willingly accept the authority of governments and accrediting agencies over policies, programs, and personnel, reject religious authority and think it a point of honor to hold the Church at arm’s length.A basic part of the problem is the position and function of those who deal professionally with words and symbols in today’s society, not just academics and journalists but lawyers, bureaucrats, and producers of pop culture. The activities of such people are big business, the potential rewards attract clever and energetic careerists, and the growth and pervasiveness of government, bureaucratic organization, and electronic communications give them unprecedented power.That situation has profoundly weakened other more traditional arrangements that are laden with symbols and were once basic to social functioning. Marriage is being abolished as a natural institution with functions that precede the state. The family circle, when it exists at all, is usually found around the TV. We don’t have proverbs and folk tales, we have internet memes and pop culture. And we’ve abandoned poets, priests, and popes in favor of Lady Gaga, TV talking heads, and Supreme Court justices.In such a world journalists aren’t wisecracking hard-drinking skeptics who afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. They have real institutional power, and they look for common ground with others who hold it. Nor is academia an ivory tower or a grove inhabited by meditative philosophers. American higher education is a half-trillion dollar industry that provides the expertise, training, and certifications that are fundamental to the technological organization of society. As such it is no more disinterested or neutral than any other big business.So the occupational outlook and interests of journalists and academics, like those of the lawyers, bureaucrats, and managers to whom they are allied, prejudices them against religion, which sets limits to human knowledge and decision, and against traditional arrangements in general, which resist centralized supervision, control, and reconfiguration. Whatever their individual or conscious views, such people as an interest group would rather have human life commercialized, bureaucratized, and controlled by officials who find out what they need to know and do from Harvard and The New York Times.The result is that education, scholarship, and public discussion today hardly offer a level playing field for people with a religious or traditionalist outlook. We hear about free inquiry and reason, but the institutional and occupational interests involved limit the applicability of that ideal. Whatever it was that led the Supreme Court and other intellectual leaders to the view that the basis for the traditional and natural view of marriage is a desire to injure people, it wasn’t free inquiry and reason in any real sense.In fact, the radical weakening of tradition, transcendent standards, and the idea of human nature, together with the bureaucratic and commercial complexity of life today, liberates those professionally involved in defining reality from the control of actual realities, no matter how obvious, and sets them free to follow the demands of power, their own or those of their patrons. Many of their theorists tell us that reality is a social construction, and there’s something to that. As a matter of practical social authority reality is not what we see in front of us, or what God, nature, and history have given us—it’s what’s on TV or in the prestige press.

Janssen’s most distinguished student was Ludwig von Pastor (1854-1928), remembered today as one of the greatest ecclesiastical historians of all times. Pastor had been born into a well-to-do family in Aachen, Germany. His sincerely Protestant father and Catholic mother had agreed that their sons would be raised as Protestants and daughters as Catholics. The future historian of the papacy was thus duly baptized as a Protestant and, as the eldest son, was being groomed to take over the sizable family business. His father died, however, while Ludwig was still young, and partially under the influence of his mother’s friends and acquaintances in Frankfurt, where the family had relocated, but especially because of his history teacher, Johannes Janssen, his life would take a different path.

Janssen himself had declined more prestigious posts (and would eventually even decline the cardinal’s hat offered him by Leo XIII) in order to stay at the Frankfurt gymnasium, where he was charged with teaching the Catholic students. He immediately recognized the young Pastor’s gifts and aptitudes, and became a close friend of the family. As Pastor later recounted: “Janssen visited us every week at our house. Whenever possible, I accompanied him on his walks. When Janssen lived in Niederrad in 1870, I visited him every Sunday after Mass and stayed with him the whole day in the woods. These were precious hours. First, the events of the day were discussed. Then we read classics together. Janssen introduced me to all his work. Through him I got to know the historical journals. He gave me in 1871 a copy of Burckhardt’s Culture of the Renaissance and in 1873 Ranke’s Popes, and thus the impetus for my life’s work.”

This last sentence is especially important in showing that Pastor’s entire work can be seen in a way as a reply to Burckhardt and Ranke. And in fact, Ranke’s The Roman Popes in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1834-36) would serve as a stimulus to the 19-year-old Pastor in much the same way as Ranke’s History of the Reformation in Germany (1845-47) had been an impetus to his mentor, Janssen.

Pastor was twelve years old as the Prussians defeated the majority of the German states and Austria in the German Civil War of 1866, and his family was compelled to flee temporarily to Cologne. Triumphant Prussia’s subsequent introduction of the Kulturkampf would only intensify his dedication to the vision of Catholic history to which Janssen had introduced him.

Graduating from the gymnasium in 1875, Pastor would go first, on Janssen’s advice, to the University of Louvain, and then would continue his studies at Bonn, Berlin (where he was introduced to Leopold von Ranke himself), Vienna, and finally Graz, where he obtained his doctorate in 1878 with a dissertation on Church reunion attempts during the reign of Charles V. It was during this doctoral work that he became convinced that certain important problems could only be solved by an examination of original documents which he surmised were in the papal archives, at this time closed to researchers. With a zeal that was characteristic of his entire career, he wrote to various churchmen, penned two petitions, and finally sought an audience with the pope himself. Eventually he became more responsible than any other single scholar for persuading Leo XIII to open the papal archives to all, regardless of religious affiliation, in 1883. In an audience granted to a select group of historians the next year, the pope indicated both the opportunity and the responsibility that now faced Pastor, telling him: “Owing to this decree you have good advantages over Ranke…. Naturally it will also spread your fame as an historian. However, our highest aim in this grant was the honor of God and the glory of his Church.” Then addressing all present he continued: “True history must be written from the original sources. Therefore we opened the Vatican Archives to the historians for investigation. We have nothing to fear from the publication of documents. (Non abbiamo paura della pubblicità dei documenti.) Every pope, more or less, worked, some even under the greatest difficulties, for the propagation of the kingdom of God on earth and among all nations, for the Church is the mother of all…. Work courageously and perseveringly, not only for earthly reward and worldly honor, but for the glory of Him that He may crown these labors with heavenly bliss.”

These are not Thomas Jefferson’s most famous words, but they are quite famous among students of politics. They have been used for generations to justify radical political change. And, like the soaring rhetoric of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, these Jeffersonian words have gained him great renown as a friend to political progress and enemy to “the dead hand of the past.”

Jefferson, of course, was the president who praised the French Revolution, even apologizing for its murderous Reign of Terror. He was the public opponent of slavery, whose abstract condemnations were counterbalanced by his actions as a master who often sold his charges literally “down the river.” (It was George Washington who quietly freed his slaves through an iron-clad last will and testament.) Jefferson was the one who stated that “in every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty” and sought to institute a “wall of separation between church and state” to be found nowhere in our Constitutional documents or the mainstream tradition of practice in the colonies or young republic.

Still, Jefferson has his fans, including among conservatives. Conservative Jeffersonians can point out that he constantly argued for small, limited government, especially at the federal level. And he both praised and sought to defend the prerogatives of state and local government.

What, then, should we make of Jefferson, and of his grand pronouncements regarding politics and public life?

One possibility is that he was wont to let his pen run away with him; he may simply have written things that sounded good, but did not really fit with life’s practical realities, or with his deeper understanding of human nature and the social order. This might excuse his sometimes bloodthirsty comments, such as that the tree of liberty must be “refreshed” with the blood of patriots and tyrants. As to the hypocrisy regarding slavery, that can only be explained by pointing to the human failings of a man who loved books, wine, and other luxuries and was under no social pressure to put his anti-slavery principles into action.

But what should we make of a statement, like that regarding each generation “owning” the earth, that seems purely political, that has public meaning and purpose seemingly unconnected with apologies for specific acts or events? Do we “own” the earth while we are here, then pass it on to the next generation to do with as it pleases? Why, and how so?

Insofar as Americans know anything of the Spanish Civil War it is through the propaganda of Ernest Hemingway’s admittedly compelling For Whom the Bell Tolls, or through Pablo Picasso’s chaotic (and admittedly repellant) Guernica. That version goes something like this: an oppressed working class calling themselves republicans rose up against a tyrannical aristocracy allied with the Roman Catholic Church. Their people’s revolution was brutally suppressed by a fascist military dictator named Francisco Franco, who was a puppet of the German Nazi regime. The whole affair was a dress rehearsal for Nazi tyranny. For decades following the war this fascist dictator ruled Spain with an iron hand, invading private lives and suppressing individual liberties.

The truth of the Spanish Civil War, however, is that was a diabolical terror that seized Spain and waged war against the Roman Catholic Church and her Faithful. It was the greatest period of clerical bloodletting since the French Revolution and on a larger scale. It was a war waged to free Spain and the Church from the grip of Marxist tyranny. In the end the defenders of tradition, order, and Christianity won the war after which Spain enjoyed decades of prosperity and vitality and a culture in which, as Hugh Thomas (no Catholic propagandist) put it, “The Catholic Church permeated every aspect of Spanish … culture.”

The war was also the occasion of great acts of Catholic heroism, and on September 27 each year we should recall the thrilling conclusion of one of these and honor its heroes. The event was the siege of the Alcazar of Toledo.

The early political careers of President Obama and Gotham’s likely next mayor, Bill de Blasio, have followed similar trajectories. Both Obama and de Blasio emerged from the radical activist wings of their respective big-city Democratic parties. Both achieved broad political success despite their leftist backgrounds, winning big electoral victories against the odds. Both have attractive, mixed-race families that have added to their political allure.

Each candidate also has had to deal with potentially damaging revelations about past involvement with violent anti-American radicals. Obama had personal and political ties to the ex-Weather Underground domestic terrorist William Ayers and the virulently anti-American and anti-white Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Earlier this week, the New York Timesreported that, when he was 26, de Blasio went on a political pilgrimage to Nicaragua—then ruled by the Marxist-Leninist Sandinistas—and came back to the United States a dedicated “Sandalista” (as leftist American supporters of the Sandinistas were then called). Several years later, de Blasio and his wife illegally honeymooned in Communist Cuba.

At 26, Joe Lhota was a newly minted Harvard MBA. Bill de Blasio was playing footsie with the Sandinistas. Guess which one is going to be the next mayor of New York City?

According to polls, Democrat de Blasio is running ahead of Lhota, his Republican rival, by more than 40 points. With such a seemingly insurmountable lead, de Blasio is on the cusp of becoming mayor of the most populous city in the United States. But his glide path to Gracie Mansion suffered a downdraft this week when the New York Times reported that de Blasio spent the latter part of the 1980s working for a U.S.-based nonprofit that sent food aid and medical supplies to supporters of the Sandinistas, the socialists who ruled Nicaragua and fought a guerilla war against U.S.-backed Contra militias. In a 1990 interview with the New York Times, de Blasio, then known as Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm (though the Times calls him “William Wilhelm”) and described as “a leader in the solidarity network,” praised the Marxist revolutionaries. “They gave a new definition to democracy,” he said.

Even in liberal, open-minded New York, these revelations raised eyebrows. The Big Apple is known as a progressive city, but New Yorkers have not elected a Democratic mayor in 20 years. Naturally, the de Blasio campaign has been eager to suggest that the candidate’s views have evolved, if not softened, since he was a young man. Though de Blasio won the Democratic nomination by running to the left of his primary opponents, he is transitioning now to a general-election strategy that he hopes will have broader appeal.

Bill de Blasio was born Warren Wilhelm, Jr. on May 8, 1961 in New York City and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Shortly after graduating with a bachelor's degree from New York University in 1983, he legally changed his name to Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm, adding his mother's maiden name to his identity. In 2002 he changed his name for a second time and became Bill de Blasio.

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In 1988, de Blasio, an ardent supporter of the Marxist, Soviet-backed Sandinista government of Nicaragua, joined a number of his QC colleagues in a ten-day trip to that country to help distribute food and medicine to people who had been affected by the violent revolution that was raging there. (The Reagan administration, meanwhile, was giving financial and military aid to the Contras, who were seeking to overthrow the Sandinista regime.)

Upon returning home from Nicaragua, de Blasio began working for a New York-based nonprofit organization dedicated to improving health care in Central America. Continuing, moreover, to support the Sandinistas in whatever way he could, he joined the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York, an organization that held meetings and fundraisers on their behalf. De Blasio also subscribed to the Sandinista party’s newspaper, Barricadda. He continues to speak admiringlyof the Sandinistas to this day, lauding the “humble” and “really inspirational” blend of “youthful energy and idealism” that they brought to the task of “trying to figure out what would [make their society] work better.”....

When asked in 1990 to describe his political views, de Blasio replied that he was an advocate of “democratic socialism.” In the mid-nineties, he served as executive director of the New York branch of the New Party, a pro-socialist, ACORN-affiliated entity to which Barack Obamalikewise belonged.

In 1994 de Blasio managed New York Congressman Charles Rangel's re-election campaign. When de Blasio married former lesbian activist Chirlane McCray that same year, the couple honeymoonedin Fidel Castro's Cuba, in violation of the U.S. ban on travel to that country.

In 1996 de Blasio ran the New York state operation for the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign.

In 1997 de Blasio was appointed as the New York/New Jersey regional director of the Clinton administration's Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), where he served under HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo.

In 2002 de Blasio joined a number of fellow legislators—mostly from the City Council’s Black, Hispanic, and Asian Caucus—in a City Hall ceremony honoring Robert Mugabe, the openly anti-white, Marxist dictator of Zimbabwe.

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In September 2009, when the community organization ACORN was engulfed in several major scandals involving voter-registration-fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, and racketeering, de Blasio wrote a letter to ACORN's leaders reaffirming his support for the organization, though noting that he was “troubled” by the recent revelations.